Can Positive Thinking Help You Heal?

A big part of the book I'm writingMind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof You Can Heal Yourself (Hay House, 2013) is about how positive belief, hope, and expectation can trigger self-healing superpowers that manifest physiologically in the body, so I was delighted to read this article on CNN by one of my heroes, Dr. Deepak Chopra.

In this article, Dr. Chopra (can I call him Deepak?) calls attention to the warring schools of thought between the power of positive thinking camp and the conventional medical community regarding whether positive thoughts can affect the health of the body.

So does this mean positive thinking doesn't work? It's enough to confuse anyone.

What does Deepak Chopra think?

Dr. Deepak writes:

Doctors are confused, too. It has always been part of a doctor's kit bag to tell patients to keep their spirits up. Until a few decades ago, it was standard not to acquaint a dying patient with the gravity of his condition, which implies an unspoken agreement that hearing bad news isn't good for patients.

At the same time, doctors want to protect their profession, so few want to cross the line and support the notion that how you think can work as powerfully as "real" medicine.

Let's see if some of this confusion can be cleared up.

First of all, thinking is "real" medicine, as proven by the placebo effect. When given a sugar pill in place of a prescription drug, an average of 30% of subjects will show a positive response. What causes this response isn't a physical substance but the activity of the mind-body connection. Expectations are powerful. If you think you've been given a drug that will make you better, often that is enough to make you better.

But if studies showed that positive thinking didn't effect cure rates, what do we make of this? Dr. Deepak says:

On the plus side, the studies that debunk positive thinking deal with very sick patients struggling to recover from major diseases. They do not comment on how positive thinking might prevent disease or how it might affect someone in the very early stages of illness. The real point isn't to rescue a dying patient but to maintain wellness... The upshot is that medicine cannot be definitive on how mood affects wellness. But if I wanted to enhance a state of wellness before symptoms of illness appeared, there is much to be gained and no risks involved in trying to reach the best state of mind possible.

Healing Vs. Curing

After reading about the study on his patients, I emailed Bernie Siegel and wrote, "It seems to me that the equivocation over whether support groups help cancer patients in randomized controlled trials is a bit silly, because while you can study cure rates, you can't really study rates of healing, and as you and I both know, healing and curing are different.

I would argue that your patients - even if they died - probably died healed because of the love and support. But that's just my two cents."

Beyond Healing

But I still believe that love, support, and positive belief go far beyond healing and can actually manifest cure - and there's loads of science to prove it, as I'm finding with my research. It's tough to study support groups and outcomes related to them. How do you know if the people are really believing they can get well? How can you measure these things?

I'm trying to get to the bottom of these very issues in my own mind, so I can help translate them for you. But I love that this conversation is even happening on websites like CNN and from the mouths of doctors like Deepak. Things are shifting. There is resistance from the medical community, of course, but there is also a softening that I'm already starting to feel and witness, even from the private emails doctors are sending me.

We are ready for this shift. It is time.

What Do You Believe?

Do we have the power to heal ourselves? Does the mind affect the body? Can positive thinking alter physiology? Share your thoughts.

What if I told you caring for your body was the LEAST important part of your health? Watch my TEDx talk here to learn the MOST important part.

At first I thought you were going to be some nutjob but this is pretty well-balanced. What I think is that the mind has definite physiological effects, but like you said, it's probably not going to turn around a cancer prognosis. If people get all of the things that they need to reverse a disease and simultaneously improve thinking, it will be better than just the regular treatment. Point one, many diseases have a chronic inflammatory component, where the immune system does more damage than good due to the lack of ability to regulate itself. Depression pretty much kills the endorphin response of the brain, and endorphins are anti-inflammatory, an easy google search shows that. Stress also has negative effects, so if someone keeps calm and tries to be happy then they have those things going for them. But cancer is a tricky one, because just making those changes isn't going to let the cells initiate apoptosis again, that's a much bigger problem.

The most important thing that advocates of using psychology in improving medicine can do is to not overstate the effects of thought, it is never so simple. When crazy man X says "we can use the power of the mind over the body to heal it", what he should really be saying is that "the mind exerts various physiological effects that play a role in disease, and getting the mind working on our side could improve a prognosis, and definitely improve the quality of life for the patient." but that's not sensational and fun like big claims are.

What is proven to help someone? Does Western Medicine have anything to offer that will "cure" a late-stage terminal cancer patient? No? Do we then conclude that chemo and radiation et al are also useless? No? Are the people who advocate such therapies charlatans? No? Then why do they demand that nontraditional approaches should work in a situation where their therapies do not work either?

I believe Stabby (in the first post) has the right idea. To try and overstate the power upon "the whole" is something that is a natural tendency. However, the power is there and can be, under the right conditions, an extremely strong one; perhaps even "miraculous" in it's potential to heal(my opinion). The problem with doing studies on this, is that so much relies upon the individual's firm belief that they are healing. You can't "detect" slightest doubts within people, so it makes a 'study' nearly impossible. Even if a patient can say that they ARE completely convinced of being healed/cured, they might just so want to be well so badly & wanting to "be there"; when in actuality they just can't submit complete faith to the process. There are so many possible variables, is all I'm saying. To dismiss the power completely is to close the mind, and the heart, and any doctor that can do that is as bad as the phony "faith healers" you see on television. How it would be possible to integrate the power into actual medical practices is the problem, and until some major breakthrough in gaining a better understanding of the power and it's potential occurs, we'll remain in the dark. Lastly, another possible approach to this might be to focus not so much on the power that 'positive' thinking has to 'improve', as the extreme power "negative" thinking has to destroy the healing process (?)